Nokia Sues Android Device Manufacturer Viewsonic over SMS Patent

MUNICH, Germany – Nokia seems to be on a roll with legal actions against its competitors. Barely a day after getting a legal nod on enforcement actions against the Blackberry firm Research In Motion, the Finnish giant is set to take on Android device makers ViewSonic.

Nokia has slapped a patent infringement action against ViewSonic over what it claims to be proprietary sorting text messages (SMS) by conversation. A first hearing on the same was held at the Munich I Regional Court yesterday.

What is essentially under dispute is the feature of sorting text messages by a user, so that they can be displayed anytime as a conversation thread. Nokia’s patent does not explicitly prevent others from making use of a threaded view of conversations held by SMS, but it covers the crucial ground of attaching a thread ID to every single message as well as keeping all messages of a particular thread in a single folder.

Nokia has lodged multiple patent infringement complaints in the recent past and the patent-in-suit, EP0982959, happens to be one among 32 such patent infringement allegations that Nokia has issued against HTC.